On Saturday evening, there was a story making its rounds that a hacker claimed to have nicked information from approximately 3 million Verizon Wireless customers which was in plain-text, and this hacker allegedly posted the information for 300,000 customers online from Saturday onwards. Calling himself “TibitXimer”, the hacker mentioned over Twitter (prior to the account being removed) some clarifications, stating that the names and information were taken from a list of Verizon FIOS customers, where content of such information include sensitive data such as serial numbers, names, addresses, starting date with Verizon, password to one’s account, and phone numbers among others.
What about the folks over at Verizon? How are they taking it? The carrier has stepped forward with a statement of their own, where Verizon spokesman Alberto Canal claimed that “The ZDNet story is inaccurate. The ZDNet story is inaccurate. We reported this incident to the authorities when we first learned of it months ago and an investigation was launched. No Verizon systems were breached, no root access was gained, and this incident impacted a fraction of the number of individuals being reported.”
I guess everyone else can sleep easy this Christmas, but I won’t be surprised of TibitXimer comes up and throws a spanner in the works along the way.